French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is. – Alan Furst
I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt. – Alan Furst
Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel. – Alan Furst
I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience. – Alan Furst
I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past. – Alan Furst
What I discovered is I don’t like to repeat lead characters because one of the most pleasurable things in a book to me is learning about the lead. – Alan Furst
Le Carre’s voice – patrician, cold, brilliant and amused – was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction. – Alan Furst
Women take great care of themselves in France. It’s a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners. – Alan Furst
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I’m a genre writer. – Alan Furst
Seattle’s support system got me through those early, difficult years. It was a very funky, very friendly, very relaxed place that had it all for a writer. – Alan Furst
I’d never been in a police state. I didn’t know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it. – Alan Furst
For something that’s supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published. – Alan Furst
We’re the roughest people in the way we play and live, and that is because Americans come from people who all got up one morning and went 5,000 miles, and that was a time in the 19th century when it wasn’t so easy to do. – Alan Furst
I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated. – Alan Furst
I love the gray areas, but I like the gray areas as considered by bright, educated, courageous people. – Alan Furst
I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead. – Alan Furst
Graham Greene’s work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and ‘Our Man in Havana’ may be his best. – Alan Furst
I don’t inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I’ve uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war. – Alan Furst
I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it’s high, it’s good – but it’s escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means. – Alan Furst
I wrote three mysteries and then a contemporary spy novel that was unbelievably derivative – completely based on ‘The Conversation,’ the movie with Gene Hackman. Amazingly, the character in the book looks exactly like… Gene Hackman. – Alan Furst
Yes, I’m a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and ’40s. I’ve never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn’t know what to say about contemporary society. – Alan Furst